OpenNTF IP Manager: Lotus Awards

Posted by Peter Tanner on December 2, 2009

This is the second of a series of three
IP-related blogs. Yesterday I discussed the process of moving Projects
into the Catalog. Tomorrow will be about the GPL Catalogue. And
today some thoughts on the Lotus Awards.

As you know, there are two Lotus Awards
associated with OpenNTF – one for the Best Open Source Contribution by
an Individual, the other for the Best Open Source Contribution by a Business
Partner. See here
and here.

I would like to make a suggestion for
those who are planning on submitting entries. Do it early – or at
least run a draft by me well before the deadline.

One of the conditions of the contest
is that the application must be ready to post into the OpenNTF Catalog.
This means that the IP must be demonstrably clean. So:- you do need to ensure that all the
authors are covered by an ICLA or CCLA;- any code that you get from elsewhere,
such as from other open source projects, is covered by a license that is
compatible with the overall license of your project.

This may seem simple, but, as I mentioned
in my last posting, we are finding code that authors have forgotten they
used, and which may or may not have compatible licenses. So, by submitting
early, you can have your code checked out – and have some time to fix
any problems that we might find.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and do
not work for a legal firm. The OpenNTF vetting only checks if submissions
conform to OpenNTF standards – and should not be used as a guarantee of
the absence of possible third party IP claims.